Prologue

It’s gone eleven one Saturday night. I’m sitting at the laptop by the lounge window, writing, drinking wine, waiting for Fon to come home from the restaurant. We haven’t been going out that long, but long enough for her to stay the night once or twice a week. I’ve got Abbey Road on the stereo, the old vinyl LP I’ve had since I was about ten crackling warmly in the evening room. It’s one of the first records I ever bought, and although by now my collection is several hundred strong, this is one of probably only a dozen albums I play on a regular basis. As her key scrapes in the door, the needle’s about half way through the last track on side one – I Want You (She’s So Heavy).

“Hi!”

“Hallo tee-rak,” she says, using the Thai word for ‘darling’, and kisses me.

“Good evening?”

“Yes, very good. Very busy. Loss of tips!”

“Why, what happened? Where’d you lose them?”

“Lose?”

“You just said ‘loss of tips’?”

“No,” she says, digging in her pocket to rustle notes and jingle coins at me. “Lots of tips!”

“Oh, right. Well done.”

“What’s this music?”

“It’s The Beatles, darling.”

“The Beatles?” She looks at me, her lip curled Elvis-style, as if I just told her it was the Queen Mother. “The Beatles don’t make records like this.”

“Didn’t make records,” I correct.

“Didn’t make records,” she repeats.

“Anyway, they certainly did... why, have you never heard this before?”

“Never,” she says.

“You’re kidding!” I’m not being sarcastic or snobbish – it really is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who hasn’t heard the record. Suddenly far more than just my umpteenth listen of an old classic, it’s an occasion to rise to. “Well, you’re in for a treat,” I say. “This is Abbey Road. Their last album. And one of the best albums ever made by anyone in the entire history of the universe.”

“Really?” she says as if it’s gospel, putting her bag down and fishing out a packet of Consulates. Lighting up, she ponders John Lennon wrenching out another primal scream of desire over the swelling guitars, organ and drums. “It’s very strange,” she announces, and sits down opposite me, unfurling a Thai magazine with a photo of a smart, regal-looking woman on the cover. It’s either their queen or the princess – I always confuse the two.

“Not all the tracks are like this,” I say, just to be sure.

“Mmm,” she says, inhaling the fragrant smoke, well into the magazine.

I decide not to say anything more about the record, mostly because I’m listening to it and she’s reading but also because I want to see what happens in a minute.

“She’s so – ”

The band breaks into that intoxicating coda: swirling and building, intense and huge, it slowly threatens to fill the room and our heads with an endless orgasm of white noise. She glances up at the stereo and then at me, pulling a face which says Are you absolutely sure about this?, directed as much at the group for making the record as me for loving it so much. I smile back at her, resisting the temptation to turn the stereo down. She returns to the magazine but I keep my eye on her face over the lost horizon of the laptop screen.

In more than two decades of listening to the album, I’ve never once counted the number of times the band repeats the final figure, and despite being a big Beatles fan I’m not enough of an anorak to want to know. However, even though the last repetition starts out no differently from any of the others, the song has been absorbed into my unconscious to such an extent that I can always tell when the track’s about to end. This time is no exception: as the final arpeggio gradually works its way to the climax, I study Fon’s face, hardly daring to blink in case I miss the moment. She’s still reading, the endless music now just wallpaper to her ears, her eyes firmly down on the page of Thai. And then,

shikk

Suddenly there’s nothing – it’s as if all the air has been sucked out of the room and we’re sitting in a vacuum. The track, the album, the whole evening all come to a halt, leaving us in the middle of nowhere. Fon’s face flashes up at me like someone bursting back to consciousness from a dream, her mouth open, her eyes the definition of surprise. It’s history in the making... I wish I had a camera.

“What!” she says, and I laugh.

Actually, I’m glad I haven’t got that camera: you take a photo and you forget the image, or you forget the moment you took it. It’d only end up as one of the million silly snaps all couples take of each other. I realise I’m lucky to have that image of her face as it was when she first heard the abrupt ending of I Want You (She’s So Heavy), along with every other detail, every rustle and crackle of that record, imprinted forever on my memory.

Or at least I was – lucky, I mean. I was never able to listen to that track again without remembering that evening, the happiness and cosiness of it, and Fon’s face. That was good for a long time but then I couldn’t listen to it without remembering the innocence we still had of each other and of the difficulties and heartbreaks that were yet to come.

The last time I listened to Abbey Road must have been a few weeks before I moved out of the flat, which itself was a few months after Fon left. If our relationship just before that time sounded like the swirling, maddening coda of I Want You (She’s So Heavy), her leaving sounded like the sudden silence as the track ended and the needle lifted off the spinning vinyl. I don’t even have the album anymore.